


White Noise in Kansas at Night

by WheatKing



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Domestic, M/M, Near Future, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:49:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WheatKing/pseuds/WheatKing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Did all the angels talk about us that sweetly, Cas?” Dean mutters, turning, and leans his forehead against the cold glass.</p>
<p>“Only the smart and handsome ones.” Dean shifts his head ever so slightly, looking at Cas from the corner of his eye, and Cas smiles at him, serenely.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Dean still keeps a shotgun under his bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Noise in Kansas at Night

**Author's Note:**

> None of these characters belong to me.
> 
> Watch out for swearing.

He woke, suddenly, and violently. Dreaming someone was watching, someone rattling the door of one their many unchanging motel rooms. He took a second to consider, trying to pull the dream away, out of his head. He is in his bedroom. In his house.

 

 

They’re out past the decrepit drive-in, hangout for the delinquent beer-drinking teenagers and the depressing 21 year olds that buy it for them. Riddled with potholes and home to blackflies and mosquitos, it seems to survive solely on 2nd run horror movies and the occasional Christian flick that always draws families, despite the gallons of blood that usually make the little kids cry.

 

In his bed, he can hear explosions, and sometimes dialogue. Lulled to sleep by the double-header on Friday nights, he almost always wakes again when the headlights start to sweep across the wall of the bedroom, lighting up nothing at all but paint and his balled up clothes on the chair next to the door. But that was during the summer. It’s not summer now, so it wasn’t that that woke him up.

 

He pulls himself up to a sitting position, and he looks automatically to his left, but there’s no movement. Just breathing.

 

A noise, not dreaming now. There was someone here.

 

Dean froze, then cocked his head carefully to the side, listening.

He leaned down, slowly, and with his right hand, felt the cold metal of the gun rack underneath the bed.

 

* * *

 

 

He padded down the stairs as quietly as he knew how. Which was plenty fucking quiet, thank you very much.

 

This house was drafty as _shit_ , and it had to be subzero outside, but he didn’t think about the cold floor or the freezing air. Dressed in just his faded blue boxer shorts, he wondered when he’d stopped sleeping in his jeans.

 

 He avoided the hall rug, knowing it marked the loudest of the floorboards. He moved towards the kitchen, folding into a crouch behind the pantry door. He cradled the shotgun across his chest and concentrated.

 

Gravel, crunching lightly: footsteps. They were amateurs then.

 

Any real threat trying to be stealthy would have approached from the fields behind the house, and any threat that didn’t care if they heard it coming would have struck already, when Dean was still upstairs. He flicked the safety back on, and stood up from his crouch. Moved to the back door and stilled again, listening.

He heard a few more footsteps, heavy and lighter. Just the two.

 

“Shhhh...my uncle will kill me if we fuck up his bolt cutters!” Desperately whispered, a young voice.

Teenagers.

 

Fuck.

 

 

They almost piss themselves when Dean whips open the back door and grabs at them. He catches denim jacket and the aforementioned bolt cutters in his hand, and pulls. He grasps the bolt cutters as he pushes two bodies in front of him, back through the door. They are in his kitchen before they can even really realize what’s happening. He dumps the bolt cutters on the ground by the door, steps through, and slams the door shut again.

 

Two teenagers shiver at him, and he wants to be back in bed.

 

He hears the creak of the floorboards he’d avoided earlier in the hall, but doesn’t flinch, as they’ve been sounded on purpose, by someone who knows both the house and Dean.

 

He inhales and then looks up, watches Cas move from the shadows of the hallway into the moonlight of the kitchen.

 

* * *

 

He’s wearing a blue pair of pajama pants and a Kansas Wildcats t-shirt he had to buy last April, when someone stole all their clothes from their locked motel room at 2 in the morning while they swam in their underwear in the motel’s crumbling pool. Two guns, his father’s journal, and the keys to the Impala were all that had been left, and those only because they had been crammed under Dean’s pillow. They had stood, side by side; dripping pools of dirty chlorine water onto the carpet, wrapped in their pathetic motel towels.

 

Dean knows he has the matching KU t-shirt upstairs, and that it smells like Cas and gun oil, because Cas had worn it last week when he was cleaning the very shotgun Dean was holding now. He’d left it thrown over a kitchen chair after getting soaked by the rain, and so it was there, mostly dry, the next day when Dean needed to pull something on after he finally admitted duct tape wouldn’t do it, and went to town to buy a new, proper size washer for the kitchen sink.

 

Dean processes all this in seconds. This is what his brain does, now.

* * *

 

The moonlight in the kitchen is brighter than in the hall, but not quite bright enough to see everything a former super-powered being needs to. Castiel thinks about human eyesight while he snaps on the overhead light. It casts an unforgiving net across the room, making everyone blink stupidly for a few seconds.

 

He sees Dean has two teenagers by their necks, one leaning away and squirming, the other slumping, accepting of this new fate. He glances at them, at their clothes, at their wet shoes, and raises his eyebrows lightly.

“Hello, boys.”

Dean shakes them both a little before he drops one, then the other, into two of their chairs. The kitchen light is very bright, and the boys look pale and gangrenous in it.

He remembers gangrene on the battlefields of Gaul, or maybe it was already France at that point. A terrible way to die, having to watch the blackness creep up your own body, and smelling yourself the whole way. He’d pitied the poor soldiers, especially the young ones, the ones that didn’t know any better what they were pledging themselves to.

 

He looks up from their faces to Dean’s.

* * *

“Caught them fucking around in our yard, near the garage, with giant-ass bolt cutters”

 

Cas looks thoughtful, but moves away, behind them, towards the coffeemaker. Dean watches him move, then scrapes a third chair towards the table and sits, across from the two teenagers.

 

He hooks a leg around the white painted wood and leaves the other stretched out to the side, between the boys and the door.

He taps at the table with his right hand while staring at them. He can see many things; these boys likely have no fathers at home, or are slow at school, don’t always have proper food or someone to tell them to wear clean clothes. In about 30 different ways, these boys scream the fact that they are most likely not loved enough, or properly, by anyone. But he is very angry, because someone has been messing with his shit. This place is his, his and Castiel’s, and no one should be able to mess with his shit. Not anymore, not now, when they take all this effort to set themselves apart, and to ask so little from anyone.

 

He also knows that if this were even 6 months ago, he might have gone outside firing instead of simply holding the Remington.

 

 

“What are you doing on my property?” He grates out, placing the shotgun on the table and flicking his eyes from one to the other.

 

They glance at each other, and he barks “Don’t fucking sit there gawking at each other, one of you, tell me what the motherfuck you were doing creeping around my property at two-fucking-am in the fucking morning!” He crashes his right fist down on the table, feels the way the legs jump a little, hears it squeak against the white and black linoleum floor underneath.

 

The smaller one makes a huffing fear noise, and starts talking.

 

“We heard you guys lived up here, just the two of you, and that you probably were making crystal in that building back there, because Taylor’s mom works at Kansas Hydro, and says your electric bill is pretty high for just two dudes living alone on a farm that doesn’t make anything, and that you were probably mixing some meth and-“ Dean doesn’t know where else this would be going but doesn’t want this skinny little bastard to tell him anything else about what Taylor or Taylor’s mom thought about them.

He slams his palm open on the table, right in front of Talky McSpills-a-lot.

 

“No meth- why always with the meth in these shitty little towns?” He bares his teeth at these little criminals in their dripping shoes, dirtying up their kitchen floor.

 

Cas snuffs, a very Cas noise, and Dean jerks his head up, over the delinquent’s heads, and looks at him holding the box of filters and smiling at Dean. Dean loses track of his outrage.

 

For Cas, maybe it’s the idea that a former Angel of the Lord would be holed up in a 90 year old 3 bedroom house with touchy plumbing, outside of a tiny Kansas town that had been shrinking since it was built, to make crystal meth in an unheated cinder-block garage. Dean cracks a grin at the thought of exactly where he is and who he’s with at 2 o’clock in the assfuck morning, and the unreality of it all makes a sound like a laugh burst out of him.

 

Seems the bigger one doesn’t like being laughed at, his face goes red and even more ugly. He narrows his piggy little eyes at Dean and blows up with what it sounds like he’s been dying to say the whole time.

 

“We also heard you two were probably cocksuckers, and some of the girls in our class aren’t allowed to come out to the drive-in anymore since you moved up here.”

 

Dean leans back and considers the beefy fucker from under his lowered eyelids. He feels like the situation would benefit from a beating.

 

Cas speaks from behind them, flicking the switch on the coffeemaker, and getting a spoon from the drawer. “Now, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? If we’re fucking each other, as you say, why are we also after those girls?”

 

Beefy frowns, but Talky works through the logic for him. “Sex maniacs, maybe?”

 

Cas lifts his eyebrows again and rubs at his jaw with his left hand. Dean can hear the rasp as he runs his knuckles against his stubble.

“Well, no, we’re not maniacs. We really don’t want to kidnap any of your female classmates. Just regular people who don’t make meth in their garage.” He shrugs a little at Dean, and then turns around to the fridge to get milk. Dean swings his eyes back towards the two in front of him. Gives them his dead eye stare, and drops his right hand on the barrel of his shotgun, still sitting in front of him on the table. Since Cas cleaned it, it shines the kitchen light right back up.

 

Both look shiny and pale, eyes drawn to how Dean is petting his gun. They don’t have to know it’s loaded with rock salt.

 

“You will not trespass here again, and if you do, if you even look at our property from the road, glance in this direction, I will fuck you up. And make no mistake, that has nothing to do with sexy times, and everything to do with beating the shit out of you, which is what I will do. Tell Taylor and his mother to shut their mouths about shit they know nothing about, and grow the fuck up.” He lurches up from his seat and the table bounces a little off his knee, his chair skids back, and he looms across the boys, still seated, still sweating in their chairs.

 

“Leave here, now.” They bump each other a little, in getting up and out. Talky gets to the door first, and fumbles the doorknob, once, twice, before getting it to turn and swing open the door. The cold air comes in for a minute, heavy and cutting, but Beefy knows his manners and hurriedly swings the door shut behind them as they push through.

 

Dean hits the lights so he can watch them go through the window in the door. He sees them reach their truck down the road, hears the rusty swing of its doors, two failed starts before the engine rolls over. They reverse back down the road, towards the Drive-in and town, instead of pulling a u-turn in front of their house.

 

The sound fades, but Dean keeps looking. He doesn’t turn around until he smells the coffee. In just the moonlight now, Cas hands him his blue mug, and Dean drinks it, even though he is hot inside.

 

“Guess we should start doing more regular things in town.” He leans against the counter and sips at his chipped green mug, makes a face, and picks up the carton to add more milk.

“Fuck no, go to their quilting circle or circle jerk or whatever, fuck that.” He takes another mouthful of hot coffee, burning the same spots again. Frowns.

 

“No, I mean going to buy food at a normal time instead of 3am when we remember. Maybe drink at their bar.” He’s cupping his right hand over the top of his mug and running his left knuckles along the stubble on his jaw again. He hates shaving, finds the process “tedious”, but Dean had told him he looked like Charles Manson, and then Googled it for him.

 

He looks thoughtful now, and not that bothered by the scene that just took place. Dean wants to know why, and wants him to understand why he _is_ angry, why he feels hot under his skin. He turns back away from Cas’ face, looks out the window again. He sees the great big blank screen of the drive-in across the fields and behind the bare trees.

“Town losers don’t get to tell me what to do, or what’s normal.” He pauses, wonders what that word means to the man standing to his left. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

 

“The half-assed burglary or the intimations?”

 

Dean doesn’t answer. Hard to tell when Cas left the land of the literal, and joined the world of the sly insinuation and wordless look.

 

“We live in 2015, Dean, as you remind me so often. There is no reasonable justification to fear a blubbered confession from a scared teenager that he and his friends equate two men being together with anything threatening.”

Dean sighs.

“People are fucking stupid, Cas. Just because it’s 2015 doesn’t mean they’re _reasonable_.”

 

Cas turns and says gently,

“No, you never have been. That is the beauty of humanity; its strength, and its weakness.” The moonlight casts shadow across his eyes, and Dean only sees the whites.

“Did all the angels talk about us that sweetly, Cas?” Dean mutters, turning, and leans his forehead against the cold glass.

“Only the smart and handsome ones.” Dean shifts his head ever so slightly, looking at Cas from the corner of his eye, and Cas smiles at him, serenely.

 

At 2 fucking am in the morning in their freezing cold kitchen.

 

They go upstairs.

* * *

 

Later, in bed, Dean wraps one arm around the pillow under his head. Watches as Cas pulls his t-shirt off by gripping it near the back of his neck, and pulling it up over his head. He knows that move most likely came from Jimmy, or maybe even Sam, because Dean lifts from the hem. He can’t remember if that’s the way his Dad did it or not. His thoughts drift.

 

Cas sinks down to the bed, pulls the sheet back up over them. They lie on their backs and quietly breathe together for a minute.

 

“If we had stuck around in a place like this long enough, I would’ve been one of those kids.”

 

“No, you would not.” Cas’ firm voice.

 

“Sure. I busted up some mailboxes in my day. Would’ve done more of it if I had a friend to be a bad influence on.” He stares at the ceiling. “I hated school, didn’t listen to anyone but my Dad, when he was there. Shoplifted at 8, and drank my first beer at 13.” Cas is silent.

“Hunting made me what I am, but sometimes I don’t know how much that was me, and how much it was Dad telling me what I was.” He clears his throat. Uncomfortable saying it, even thinking it. Uncomfortable with all of it.

“Then I look at those kids, and I think, no, it would have been worse. I would have been worse. And the kicker is that I was never even the one to make the call.” His voice goes soft. He clears his throat again.

 

Cas raises himself on his elbows, considers him, tilting his head. It jars Dean for a second, takes him to a different place. Somewhere he hadn’t been for years. He can almost see the pale figure swathed in that beige trench coat, staring at him from the doorway of an old barn, instead of the tanned and shorter-haired one in his baggy pajama bottoms propped right beside him.

He looks up and down Dean’s face, and speaks softly, “You forget, Dean Winchester, I know you.”

 

Dean supposed he did. More than anyone else he’d ever known, he did.

 

* * *

 

He waits outside the worn-out looking high school on Monday, wordlessly drops the bolt cutters into the hands of the skinny one, sees the relief across his face.

 

Then he goes home, to the grey house past the drive-in, and to Cas.

 

 


End file.
